hyperventilating over learning

Here is a great story about the power of blended learning written in preparation for International Women's Day:

But how can you not hyperventilate? My students, many of them first-generation Americans and the first in their families to attend college, are doing real research. They are doing the research that was previously restricted to scholars who possessed letters of introduction, invitations, and appointments. My students and I have none of these things. We are in a public school during a recession. And yet, we are true researchers.

 In the morning, students knock on the library door, begging to be let in. “We open in five minutes!” I call. I savor the first five minutes of the day alone with my coffee cup and my own research. Currently, I am researching Berenice Abbott, the WPA photographer known for her “Changing New York” photographs of the city. Her work is among 700,000 archived materials in New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery.

You don’t have to live in New York or own a library card to access the Gallery. Like Google Books—which also digitizes historical books—the Gallery is available to anyone with an internet connection. All you need is five quiet minutes in the morning with your coffee cup—or four, depending on the day.

Today I will only have four minutes. Students are rapping on the door, pounding harder. They want in, and come barreling through.     

 “Morning, Miss!” “What new books do you have?” “Can I use a laptop?” “Can I borrow headphones?” “How do I embed video in PowerPoint?” “Where are the Shakespeare plays?”

legacy numeracy

Another legacy of the Reagan presidency, and of all the hawkish regimes everywhere that preceded and followed him, is off the charts military spending.

happy birthday mr. president?

Last week there were a number of television moments dedicated to reflections about the presidency of Ronald Reagan on what would have been his 100th birthday. I found it all quite bewildering. Here is one of the reasons why:

catalyst

It has been a little while since the last post. I was not really sure how to follow Ms. Waring :)

Have you been to the Catalyst Centre: The One-Stop Pop-Ed Shop Worker Co-op website lately? Lots of good new stuff happening there.

In case you have never been there, here is what they do:

The One-Stop Pop-Ed Shop Worker Co-op is a collective of educators committed to democratic, social justice education and community development. Popular Education is movement, a practice and a theory of social change that based on learning and committed to resisting unjust uses of power.

One thing they have posted that might be a good follow up to the Who's counting? video is an activity called Jobology.

This activity can be used to develop some awareness in a group on the history of work i.e., how has work changed historically for different classes of people and the role of unpaid work in sustaining capitalism. These can be used for activist work against poverty, develop awareness of class, gender and hierarchy in society. Download the activity description here (1 MB PDF)

Here are some of the questions they suggest:

• How and why has work changed globally and personally over the generations?
• When and why is it important to know our history - what stops us from knowing?
• What are your thoughts about unpaid community contributions? E.g. from the union and community?
• Does anyone see a class picture here?
• What is class?
• How do students fit in this picture of work? Is learning a job?

If you try it out, let us know how it went.

mind-mapping at the NFB

This just in:
The National Film Board of Canada posted this on Twitter:
Educators – have you tried mind mapping with NFB films? The blog post is here.

I have not tried this but it looks pretty cool.

Mind-mapping is a great way for students to organize ideas and the teaching guide that accompanies our Films for Change playlist explains how this is done.

With the aid of simple technology (i.e.: a pen and paper) or more complex mapping software, students can plot out and connect the relationships between different concepts. Instructional Strategies Online provides information on how to integrate mind mapping into your teaching.

The image at the top of this post shows how we created a mind map to raise awareness of global environmental issues with facts taken from NFB films.

Follow the NFB on Twitter.

sandbox

Happy February!

I am not really sure what to make of this but I wanted to share it with you. Have you seen this amazing Ukrainian storyteller? This video has more that 12 million hits on You Tube so very possibly you have. But I just found it on the weekend.

Her name is Kseniya Simonova. She tells stories by animating sand. In this piece, the one she did for Ukraine's Got Talent (a contest she won in 2009), she tells a history of the Ukraine during the what is known in some states of the former Soviet Unions as the Great Patriotic War. The term describes the period of the Second World War from June 22, 1941 to May 9, 1945 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

From the Telegraph:
She begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated.

It is replaced by a woman’s face crying, but then a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos from which a young woman’s face appears.

She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye.

The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine, resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.

a history of the world in 100 objects

Here is something fun ... a series of 100 short (15 minute) podcasts from the BBC that tell a history of the world through a hundred objects from the British Museum.

Telling history through things, whether it's an Egyptian mummy or a credit card, is what museums are for, and because the British Museum has collected things from all over the globe, it's not a bad place to try to tell a world history. Of course, it can only be "a" history of the world, not "the" history. When people come to the museum they choose their own objects and make their own journey round the world and through time, but I think what they will find is that their own histories quickly intersect with everybody elses, and when that happens, you no longer have a history of a particular people or nation, but a story of endless connections.

Series writer and presenter, British Museum director Neil MacGregor, speaks briefly to the issue of imperialism and why all these objects are at the British Museum instead of a in museum in the region where they were discovered but does not dwell on the politics of ownership.

You can subscribe to the podcasts or download individual episodes here: www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ahow/

You can see the gallery of objects here: www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/explorerflash/#

The website gives users the opportunity to to submit items of their own for a place in world history and offers detailed information on all the objects featured in the radio programs and links to 350 other museum collections across the United Kingdom. The podcasts will be available on the website permanently for listening or downloading. There is a game called Relic, a site for schools with activities and lesson plans, and a blog that goes with the series.

The home page is a flashy mess. All the objects float around in circles that I suppose is supposed to reflect the interconnectedness of everything but it is very difficult to navigate if you are looking for a specific objects. If you want to see the objects that go with each podcast, go to the 'Programmes' page. There you will see a 'see object' link to the far right of each episode. If you click on this link, it will take you to the specific object in the AHOW gallery.

Someone has created a Wikipedia page about the series. If you scroll down to the Objects list you can see all the objects in the order of the podcasts.

• If you click on the blue words, you will see a wikipedia page about that place or thing.
• If you click on the first number after the the name of the object, you will be taken to the AHOW gallery page for that object.
• If you click on the second number after the name of the object you will be taken to the British Museum page for that object.

Warning: This series can become addictive. Also -- the listening part is only 15 minutes but that 15 minutes can easily turn into hours of clicking through the links associated with each object.

P.S. I just read Wendell's post for today and was reminded that it is Family Literacy Day. To celebrate that, listen to the podcast with someone in your family. Or a friend. Or your cat.

social media old school

Letters Of Note is a blog that celebrates the way people have used their literacy skills over the years to tell their friends and colleagues what they think about stuff.

For example, Joe Strummer wrote this about Bruce Springsteen:

Bruce is great... If you don’t agree with that you're a pretentious Martian from Venus. Bruce looks great... Like he's about to crawl underneath the chords with a spanner & sock the starter motor one time so that a engine starts up - humming & ready to take us on a golden ride way out somewhere in the yonder...

Lilian Gollan wrote this love letter to her new baby in 1934:

Thankyou for coming, Baby dear, and giving me the greatest happiness I have ever known. My dreams of you are nearly as old as I am, for every dolly was my would-be baby and yesterday, just as the sun rose above a golden shaft into the room, the dream child became a real child and you were born - A whole 8lbs of you, with soft dark, hair, curly eyelashes, perfect half moons on your tiny fingers and the funniest little wriggling feet! Oh, the wonder of you!

And a primary school student, Anthony Ferreira, wrote to President Gerald Ford in 1974 about his pardon of disgraced president Richard Nixon:

I think you are half Right and half wrong.

Sr. Freire is alive and well in...

West Sacramento, California...

For three months, a group of teens in West Sacramento, called the Sactown Heroes, took cameras and microphones to the streets to document what they liked and disliked about the city and talk about changes they would like to see.

Throughout the project, youth documented their views on West Sacramento through videos, photographs, and audio recordings, which are posted on this map.

They presented their work and their ideas at City Hall this week.

Describe your reality.

Reflect upon your reality.

Plan how to change your reality.

Transform your reality.

You can read more at the Sacramento Bee :: West Sacramento teens make their voices heard at City Hall

deep in my heart

It has been incredibly harrowing following the news from Iran. We are learning lessons about bravery, commitment and justice.

Joan Baez sings "We Shall Overcome" (with some lyrics in Farsi) for the Iranian people.

We are also learning more about how to navigate the so-called new media. One thing I like about the new media is that it is all critical literacy all the time. As I read along on Twitter, 140 characters or less at a time, it was interesting to watch how some sources came to be trusted(ish) and some were rejected.

Vietnam was the first "television war," the first "living-room war." What did it mean to the war and what did it mean to the people watching?

"The conventional wisdom has generally been that for better or for worse it was an anti-war influence. It brought the "horror of war" night after night into people's living rooms and eventually inspired revulsion and exhaustion. The argument has often been made that any war reported in an unrestricted way by television would eventually lose public support. Researchers, however, have quite consistently told another story... Only during the 1968 Tet and 1972 Spring offensives, when the war came into urban areas, did its suffering and destruction appear with any regularity on TV. For the first few years of the living room war most of the coverage was upbeat. ... By the fall of 1967, polls were already showing a majority of Americans expressing the opinion that it had been a "mistake" to get involved in Vietnam ... television was probably more a follower than a leader in the nation's [United States of America] change of course in Vietnam." -- from the Museum of Broadcast Communications.

Television told its story from September 1959 to April 1975. The Winter Soldiers told theirs in February 1971:

"We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out." -- John Kerry at the Winter Soldier hearings :: transcript.

The Winter Soldier Investigation received little media coverage at the time but did prompt the April and May 1973 Fulbright Hearings.

But a revolution was tweeted and You Tubed. We turned our profile pictures green. We navigated amateur and professional news reporters and we tried to find a truth. As reporting gets more and more immediate and we hear more and more perspectives, we work on our media literacy skills so that we can understand our world better and see it more clearly and deeply. I am not happy about the violence and injustice in Iran but I am happy that everybody seems to be questioning everything again.

feasting

If you are lucky enough to have worked in literacy, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for literacy work is a moveable feast.
                             paraphrasing A. Hotchner 

Here in Toronto, literacy workers used to get together quite a bit. The Metro Toronto Movement for Literacy and the Festival of Literacies used to provide us with many opportunities to meet and share professional wisdom. Neither of these organizations have been able to continue this and for a while we just stopped meeting.

Guy Ewing and Joy Lehman asked why. They asked, "Do we really need funding to get together and learn from each other?" Of course, the answer was no. They started to convene literacy workers at Moveable Feasts.

On Friday, Johanna Pax-Milic, coordinator of the Adult Education Program at LAMP, and a photographer, invited us to an evening of photography and discussion about creativity and community.

We met at a café in the community where Johanna lives, Parkdale. The city was well represented - there were people from all corners. And so was literacy work - there were people who work or volunteer at school board, community based, network and resource programs. They were Leo, Carol, Sue, Linda, David, Phylicia, Nancy, Joy, Johanna, Linda and me.

As usual, we spent some time catching up with each other about how our work is going. And then we talked about creatvity and photography. The theme Johanna suggested was "What moves you when you’re walking in Toronto’s neighbourhoods?"

We went out and took photographs and then returned to the café to discuss what we saw and learned. Those of us with digital cameras shared our photos.

I walked with David, Phylicia, Carol and Joy. Joy used up all her film and David did not bring his camera so the three of us used mine. These are the photos we took. The first three are by David. His pictures show the rainy night.

Then Joy photographed a window with the blind and bottles. She said it was a picture of need and want. That became our theme.

We saw that the Goodwill was still open and decided to get out of the rain. Serendipity because the Goodwill is a palace of need and want. You will see that there were a few raindrops on the lens that I did not notice at first. You will see that an out-of-control witch is only $24.99. You will see need and want comes in all shapes and sizes and is always "as is." You will see why Joy is called Joy.

The photos are in the order we took them so you can see the need and want unfold as we did.

The last three pictures are of a literacy moment that made us all laugh.





If you are interested in hosting a feast or want to be on the feast mailing list contact Guy Ewing - ewingguy [at] gmail [dot] com - or Joy Lehmann - jlehmann [at] idirect [dot] ca.

The song is "Roll On Oblivion" from the album Here's to Being Here by Jason Collett --- a beloved Toronto musician. You gotta love a guy who lists Nick Lowe as an influence. I have bought a few copies of his new CD for me and my friends. You buy one too so he does not get mad at me for putting his song in our slideshow.

feasting 2

Here are some more photos from that great night in Parkdale. The first 4 were sent in by the great, themeless photographer, Sue. The rest came from the great, experimental photographer, Nancy.



The song is "A New Name for Everything" from the album Reconstruction Site by The Weakerthans -- a beloved band from Winnipeg. I have bought a few copies of their new CD for me and my friends. You buy one too so they do not get mad at me for putting their song in our slideshow.

film shorts as text

From Bill Boyd @ the Literacy Advisor:

The short film is an ideal medium for developing the “traditional” literacies of reading, writing, talking and listening, a “short” film being a complete text lasting anything up to 30 minutes, but for our purposes ideally no more than ten or fifteen minutes, which means it can be shown two or three times in the course of a lesson if necessary. This is preferable to using an extract from a feature film as it doesn’t require an understanding of the whole work from which it has been taken, and there is a huge range of texts available, from animation to live action, fiction to documentary.

With a minimal understanding of the language of film, teachers can use short films to introduce and reinforce concepts related to reading and writing printed texts, such as narrative viewpoint, plot, characters and setting, as well as developing a greater understanding of the medium of film itself, the medium with which most of us engage most frequently. It is important to emphasise the similarities between printed and moving image texts, as well as the differences, since ultimately they are both about telling stories, and why we tell stories is arguably the reason for studying any kind of texts at all!

At the National Film Board site you can watch full-length NFB documentaries, animations and dramas online - beta.nfb.ca/

story circles

Happy May Day Everybody! International Solidarity!

May 16th is the 2nd International Day for Sharing Life Stories.

This day is an opportunity to celebrate and promote life stories, as a way to encourage critical thinking, cultural democratization and social transformation. The International Day is organized by The Museum of the Person International Network (Brazil, Portugal, USA and Canada) and the Center for Digital Storytelling (USA, Canada, Denmark, Czech Republic, Ireland and Portugal)

The chosen theme for this years' Day is Journey for Justice – Migration and Refugees. The Human Rights Commission of U.N. estimates that there are currently 21 million refugees in the world. According to the International Organization for Migration, there are 200 million international immigrants all over the world. We want to hear the stories of people who have experienced migration in order to develop dialogue about this important matter in our societies and promote social change.

Besides that, we could not leave aside the importance of any other person’s life stories. So, whatever your work with life stories is, join us! The idea of this website is to show these stories and to promote a space for listening and exchanging experiences. Post your stories, listen to other stories, and celebrate this day with us!

Find out more and add your activity for this year at ausculti.org.

Here is a video from an international story circle that happened last month.

Queen Rania of Jordan was announced as the Honorary Chair of the Global Campaign for Education's Big Read in Johannesburg. She met Basetsane Khumalo, Gcina Mhlope and Simphiwe Dana before reading her story to children from Soweto and Alex.

Find out more and add your stories at www.campaignforeducation.org/bigread

food tics

Al Jazeera has a great series on street food from different locations around the world such as Jerusalem, Cairo, Beijing, Nairobi, London, New York City, San Sebastian, and Penang.

The one on Jerusalem seems kind of topical. You might want to watch it on the Al Jazeera site and avoid the comments on You Tube :P

"Everything is overshadowed by politics in Jerusalem. Even the most basic of things like food. Food is a marker of identities and culture and is no different for the Palestinians and Israelis. It is a city torn by war - but whatever a citizens' race or religion, much of their customary street food is the same. What does that say about a shared identity and, despite decades of turmoil, how much hope does that bring for the future?"

the triple triple

I hope you all had a magical winter solstice and managed to stay warm and cozy on the longest night of the year. Here in Toronto, we were told to expect, as a follow up to the hyperbolically dubbed snowmageddon, a snowpocalypse. It turned out to be more of a snow calypso; scattered flurries of giant swirling flakes that made the big city feel like a tiny snowglobe.

I have noticed that a lot of the literacy folks who are also Facebook friends seem to enjoy playing the Scrabble-like games available on the 'book. For all those word-loving literacy workers, please enjoy this video called Craziest by Liz Dubelman of VidLit.

groundings

Cheryl Turner from Guelph Action Read talks about participating in the Tongues in Trees project:

Tongues in Trees was an outdoor installation at the MacDonald Stewart Art Centre as a part of the Shakespeare - Made in Canada Festival. Dawn Matheson, a multimedia artist and writer living in Guelph, volunteered at a poetry reading that included adult literacy learners from Action Read Guelph and was inspired by the voices speaking their own words and those of famous poets. Dawn and a group of learners worked to reveal Shakespeare as the “artist of and for Everyman, Everywoman” he really is.

Happy harvest weekend.

sewing circle

This was forwarded from The Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Living Healing Quilt Project: Promoting Healing One Stitch at a Time

If you or someone you know has been directly affected by Indian Residential Schools, then we encourage you to contribute to the Living Healing Quilt Project. The Living Healing Quilt Project is a unique way to get involved and promote a better understanding about the experiences endured by children who attended Indian Residential Schools.

Call for Quilt Blocks – How You Can Get Involved
Create your own 13” x13” square quilt block. Choose your own colour, design and material. Paint on canvas or stiff paper, or use a photo - your image can be transferred onto fabric.

Dedicate your square to a child or adult affected by Indian Residential Schools. Individual squares will represent what you wish to express about the history or your personal experience of Indian Residential Schools.

Include:
1. A brief story about your square
2. Your name, address and email
3. Your phone number (If you wish to be contacted about the progress of the quilt)

Deadline for Submissions is August 31, 2008

Please mail to:
Alice Olsen Williams
Curve Lake First Nation, ON
K0L 1R0
Tel: (705) 657-3319.
Email: alwilliams@trentu.ca

Once completed, the Living Healing Quilt Project will travel across the country with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The Living Healing Quilt Project will honour the strength, courage, and commitment of Indian Residential School Survivors and bring awareness to Canadians about Indian Residential Schools, as we move forward together on a path of healing.

order and disorder

Excerpts from a Democracy Now! interview with Isabel Allende:

If I can write it, I can cope. And I’ve been writing many books, but in every book I try to explore something in my own soul that I need to solve, I need to understand.

I see the world in terms of stories.

I was trying to explain that writing a novel is putting a pack of lies together to get to a truth, to the truth. Without that truth, the novel doesn’t work. In a memoir, it works like the other way around. You work with the truth, and then you end up lying, because my version of what happened is different from the version of everybody else in the family, you know.

Tell us about the Sisters of Perpetual Disorder.
I have a little prayer group. We call it “prayer group,” although we pray very little. We mostly talk. And it’s six women that we get together on Tuesdays, and we witness each other’s lives. We help each other, but it’s not therapy. We meditate. And we are always in touch through the email. I had the feeling that I belonged in the United States when I met these women and I found this sisterhood. I think that every woman in the world should have a circle of women. It’s very empowering.

Maybe everybody should. Have a great weekend. Hang out with your 'hood. See you Monday.

Fishing, woodblock by Joshua Rome

winter's discontent

There are quite a few literacy workers who do work on the power of story telling -- how both the telling and the listening can be healing and can help us move forward. The Winter Soldier hearings work on this principle.

Hundreds of veterans and active-duty soldiers of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars gathered in mid-March for the Winter Soldier hearings. The gathering was modeled after the 1971 Winter Solider hearings organized by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

"We called this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term 'winter soldier' is a play on words of Thomas Paine’s in 1776, when he spoke of the 'Sunshine Patriot' and 'summertime soldiers' who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough. And we who’ve come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, and we could be quiet. We could hold our silence. We could not tell what went on in Vietnam. But we feel, because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, not red coats, but the crimes which we’re committing are what threaten it, and we have to speak out."

John Kerry testifying at the Winter Soldier hearings in 1971

Listening to the stories is a harrowing experience. The stories are an accounting of horrible acts but the telling is an act of bravery and a plea for peace, both personal and global.

Vietnam Veterans Against the War Winter Soldier Hearings (1971)

WinterSoldier.com (1971)

Winter Soldier The Film (1971)

Iraq Veterans Against the War Winter Soldier Hearings (2008)

Winter Soldiers Past and Present on Democracy Now! : Part 1 : Part 2 : Part 3

The Planting, woodblock by Joshua Rome